Charles, Rebecca

ORAL HISTORY OF REBECCA CHARLES
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
November 20, 2016
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is November 20, 2016. I am at my studio here in Oak Ridge, and today I'm speaking with Rebecca Charles. MRS. CHARLES: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: Rebecca, thank you for taking time on this Sunday afternoon to come over and talk with me. I appreciate it. MRS. CHARLES: Okay. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, I know that you said there are other people that would be much better telling your family's story than you, but I'm sure you'll be just fine. Let's start at the beginning. You were born in Oak Ridge, is that correct? MRS. CHARLES: Pretty much. MR. MCDANIEL: Pretty much. MRS. CHARLES: My parents lived here. For whatever reason, my mother's doctor was in Knoxville, so I was technically born at Baptist hospital in Knoxville. MR. MCDANIEL: I see. I see, but they lived here. MRS. CHARLES: But they lived here, and I've always lived here. MR. MCDANIEL: Why don't you tell me about before you were born. Why don't you tell me the story of your parents and how they ended up in Oak Ridge. MRS. CHARLES: They were both from around Washington, Pennsylvania. It's in western Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. They had already met there, and then my father was drafted into the Army. They both worked for the WPA [Works Program Administration]. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did they? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so this was in the '30s, I guess? MRS. CHARLES: Then my father was drafted into the Army and he was sent a couple different places for basic training and stuff, but eventually he volunteered, I think, to come to Oak Ridge. I don't think he had any clue where he was going. He came to Oak Ridge in the Army still. MR. MCDANIEL: In the Army? MRS. CHARLES: In the Army, yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Was he married? Were they married at this time? MRS. CHARLES: Yes, I believe they were already married. He later sent for my mother to come down, too. I remember her saying that she tried to call him and they told her there was no such place and she couldn't call him. They had eloped when they were in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, but they wanted to have a religious wedding, so I know that when they got back down here they got married again. MR. MCDANIEL: Did they? MRS. CHARLES: In Knoxville. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. MRS. CHARLES: It was about a year later they had a second wedding in Knoxville. MR. MCDANIEL: Your dad was in the service, in the military, when he came here, so I imagine he was a part of the Special Engineer Detachment. It's just what they called the thousand or so soldiers who were here working. Did he have a trade, or training in a specific area? MRS. CHARLES: He had a Bachelor's degree, and I know that they sent him for extra training because he went to Lehigh University and they did some extra training. It's in some of those documents that I brought, the training and the extra stuff he learned. He was an instrument technician and things like that, so he worked at K-25, at the Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Eventually, when the war ended, he went ahead and stayed there and worked for Union Carbide, who ran it, I guess, originally. He hired in with Union Carbide as a civilian, also, and then just went ahead and stayed here. He kind of worked his way up through the ranks and he eventually was Department Head of Field Services out at K-25. MR. MCDANIEL: What was your father's name? MRS. CHARLES: Nathan Landay. MR. MCDANIEL: Nathan Landay, okay. All right, did he stay at K-25 the rest of his career? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, he retired from there. They used to give these really fancy clocks out and somebody still has that clock [inaudible 00:03:44] they used to give you. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Do you remember about what year he retired? MRS. CHARLES: It was, I believe, in the '70s. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right, okay. Well good, good. Your parents came here, they lived in Oak Ridge, where did they first live when they came here? Do you remember? MRS. CHARLES: I know they talked about it, they must've lived out on West Outer or a couple different places before I was born. All of it was a room somewhere, or you know, a room in somebody else's apartment. None of it was very permanent or very ... MR. MCDANIEL: Or their own. MRS. CHARLES: Or their own. MR. MCDANIEL: Where were we? We were talking about ... MRS. CHARLES: Where my parents lived. MR. MCDANIEL: ... where your parents lived. Yeah, you said that they had found a place. They were living in other people's homes… MRS. CHARLES: Renting rooms in other- MR. MCDANIEL: …a room or something like that, yeah. MRS. CHARLES: I know my mother would say that they didn't have any laundry or anything. I remember her saying she had to wash the clothes in the bathtub. All they had was one little room. Sometimes a whole family would live in a house and there'd only be a couple bedrooms, and they'd still rent a room from them. Their extra room. I guess it was really hard to get somewhere to live. Eventually they wanted a house of their own and they couldn't get one in Oak Ridge, so they moved to Lenoir City. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: The letter I have says they moved to a FHA [Federal Housing Administration] house that was just being completed in Lenoir City. MR. MCDANIEL: The letter that you had, you were just telling me about the lady that ... Was that in Lenoir City or Oak Ridge? MRS. CHARLES: Oak Ridge was where they were living when the lady threw them out. MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me that story. MRS. CHARLES: Okay, so I just read the letter. They moved in. They had to leave their last house because somebody's mother was moving in with them, and they moved in with this woman whose husband's just left two weeks ago. She was renting out her extra room, partly because she's afraid without enough people living in the house, she's going to get thrown out. She had a three year old child. She told them all her troubles and they listened patiently to her. Then the next day, she came and told them that they're going to have to move again, because she's been to the psychiatrist and he said that with everything that was going on, she needed to settle her nerves and come home to an empty house. I guess they had only been there a day or two, and just moved, and so my dad says they needed to get their own house this time because they're not going to do that anymore. MR. MCDANIEL: They're not going to do that again. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: How funny. Okay, so we're going to start over with your Dewey Road to Euclid. MRS. CHARLES: Okay, so we lived on Dewey Road and, like I said, I have lots of pictures because Ed Westcott, I think he lived on Delaware maybe, and they were friends with my dad. I used to play with their son. I can't remember a lot because I was only three or four years old. I remember a little bit when I was three. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. MRS. CHARLES: I remember some of it. Then we moved to Euclid Circle. MR. MCDANIEL: In about '54 or so? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, I think about '54. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: Somewhere around there. '54 or '55, because it was before I started to school, so I would've been four or something when we moved there. Then the houses went up for sale. There was a whole story about my dad was going to go on vacation and he was so worried that he wouldn't get to buy the house, and he really wanted to buy it, so he talked them into coming in early and selling it to him. That's how he ended up buying it before anybody else- MR. MCDANIEL: So he was the first person in Oak Ridge to purchase one of the government homes? MRS. CHARLES: That was the story. There was the newspaper article that you saw. MR. MCDANIEL: You brought me a newspaper article that had a big picture of him signing the contract, and whatever, to the house. MRS. CHARLES: I'm sure he paid cash, because my dad grew up in the Depression and there was no way he could stand to owe money. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, he did because I read that in the article that he paid cash for the house. It went on to talk, in the article, about he was leaving the next day but he didn't want to leave without getting home insurance on it. MRS. CHARLES: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: So he purchased the first house insurance policy in Oak Ridge. MRS. CHARLES: That's pretty cool, too. MR. MCDANIEL: From Red Williams Insurance Agency. MRS. CHARLES: I remember them coming and taking the pictures they had in the paper about him buying the house. The only one that's in that, that was the anniversary I showed you, so there's only him. I remember that they came and took pictures of me. You know the little tractor that you have outside? MR. MCDANIEL: Yes. MRS. CHARLES: I was sitting on my little tractor in front of our house that we had just bought when they came. MR. MCDANIEL: The little John Deere tractor. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, and they came and took it. Ours was red. MR. MCDANIEL: Was it? I think ours was red, too, originally. MRS. CHARLES: They came and took my picture on my, I remember that, sitting on my tractor outside. I'm not even sure I realized why they were taking my picture but I still thought it was really exciting. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This house, what was the address? MRS. CHARLES: 122 Euclid Circle. It's off East Drive. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, 122 Euclid Circle. Did you grow up in that home? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, we never moved from that house. He died in 2010 and that's where he lived when he died. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. He was 97 when he died and he still lived in that house. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Wow. Let's kind of switch over a little bit to you. Let's talk a little bit about growing up in Oak Ridge. What was it like for you? MRS. CHARLES: I don't think that I would've known that it wasn't typical because, you know, you're a kid and everything just is how it is. You don't question anything, you just accept life. I do remember, looking back, certain things that were probably unusual in that everybody was around the same age that came to the city. They were all fairly young. So that on my street, on Euclid, almost every single house had a kid within a year of my age. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. CHARLES: We had this huge gang of kids that would hang out and, since we lived on a circle, we were out in the street a lot because there wasn't much traffic. Plus the fact that most people just had one car, so once the husband went to work, or whatever, there weren't too many cars around anyway. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. CHARLES: I mean, I remember a lot of the stuff that we did. I mean, we had huge hide-and-seek games and we had kick-the-can games. There was like a fort down in the woods that the kids built, down in the green belt, and everybody would go down there. We played foursquare out in the street, and then when a car would come in, everybody would yell at us and tell us we couldn't play in the street. As soon as the car left we'd go back out in the street and play again. We'd have big jump rope things going all the time. There were so many kids that it's almost like you only played with your grade, because- MR. MCDANIEL: There was plenty. MRS. CHARLES: There was plenty, so you wouldn't play with a different grade than you, like one higher or one lower. You just played with your grade. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you go to school? MRS. CHARLES: I went to Glenwood. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so you went to Glenwood. MRS. CHARLES: I remember that, I think when I was in kindergarten, the bus would pick us up, maybe, but we had to walk out to East Drive later, I know, to go get the bus. We had to walk around the circle and walk out, but most of us would walk to school. MR. MCDANIEL: It wasn't that far from where you were. MRS. CHARLES: It was about a mile if you went on East Drive, but if you went down to the end on Euclid place, there was a path there and it was graveled. It went down to Andover. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: On the roads, it's a long ways apart but, geographically, they're actually right next to each other. There's just like a yard. The two yards hit each other from Andover and Euclid Place. We'd go that way and then cut down, and then eventually somebody who lived in that house figured out that that graveled path was not publicly owned. It was actually on their property. So they closed it off and they wouldn't let us go through there anymore. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, so then we had to go all the way around. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, that's not very nice. I remember when I walked to elementary school, we had a path and it went through a bunch of people's yards. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. They put a fence up and they didn't let us go through anymore. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, wow. MRS. CHARLES: Another thing that I remember, and I didn't understand it, I was little, but there were all that we called ball fields. My brothers actually went and played baseball down on the "ball fields" but they weren't really ball fields. MR. MCDANIEL: They were just big fields, weren't they? MRS. CHARLES: They were the spoils area, I think, from where they took the dirt and stuff for the construction. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MRS. CHARLES: So they dug out for the construction and they left a big muddy flat, with usually a hill of dirt behind it. So it was perfect for playing ball because the pitcher could throw it and it wouldn't go anywhere, because it could hit the wall of dirt. Then they could put out the bases and it was all nice and flat, and stuff. MR. MCDANIEL: Where was the one that was nearest you? MRS. CHARLES: It was between Euclid and East Drive. MR. MCDANIEL: Was it? MRS. CHARLES: But there was more of them, because we called them ball field one, ball field two, ball field three. Yeah, we had names for them. That was the ball field one, and I don't think we ever actually used any of the other ones for ball fields. I don't think they actually ever were ball fields, but just because they looked like the one we used, we called them ball fields. We always called them ball fields. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, wow. Sounds like growing up in Oak Ridge was just a big time. MRS. CHARLES: I guess it was- MR. MCDANIEL: Typical. MRS. CHARLES: I guess it was good. It was in the days when you didn't ever lock your house. We locked our house when we went on vacation, and my dad always turned off the water at the street with the ... MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really? Did he? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. Yeah, he would never leave the water on in the house when we went on vacation, so he always did that. MR. MCDANIEL: I wonder why. I wonder if that was something that, when he was growing up, that he learned to do. Maybe when he was growing up he had a flood because they didn't do that, or something, or knew somebody. MRS. CHARLES: I don't know. He always turned our water off when we went on vacation. It is kind of strange. MR. MCDANIEL: That is kind of strange. MRS. CHARLES: But, of course, I thought that was normal, too. MR. MCDANIEL: Of course. Of course. Did your mother work outside the home, or did she just take care of the kids? MRS. CHARLES: My mother worked when they first came to Oak Ridge, and she was secretary, stenographer, and she was very, very good. I think that she was a secretary to someone important at K-25 but I don't remember who. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? Okay. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. Yeah, she was very fast, and very good, and she was very smart. She hadn't gone to college because her family was poor and she had to go to work when she finished school, but she actually graduated first in her high school. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MRS. CHARLES: But she couldn't go on. Later on, when I was maybe in college, maybe starting a little before there ... She actually started working when I was middle school, and she worked at RSIC, Radiation Shielding Information Center, out at X-10. Her boss was Betty Moskowitz . She was a secretary out there, and then she decided she'd go back to college. She went back to UT [University of Tennessee] and she finished a Bachelor's degree in English, eventually. I mean she went part-time for a while. She was a very smart lady, and so they invited her to join Phi Beta Kappa. She told the story that she goes to join Phi Beta Kappa, and they tell her that, "Excuse me. The parents are supposed to be in the other room." MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? How fun. MRS. CHARLES: She said, "I'm the one being inducted." Anyway, that's her story. MR. MCDANIEL: That's funny. I guess that was fairly common, to a certain degree. Same thing happened with my mother. She stayed at home until we were in high school and then she went back to work. She ended up working at the Lab and got her Bachelor's degree, I think, at 61. Something like that, you know. She wanted to do that. MRS. CHARLES: She always wanted to do that. That was a really big thing, for her to get to go to school. MR. MCDANIEL: But she stayed home while you kids were growing up? MRS. CHARLES: When we were little, she stayed home. My mother could not drive. When she came to Oak Ridge, she'd never had a car and she didn't know how to drive. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: I remember taking buses. There used to be buses in Oak Ridge. I remember the old bus, I guess it's Bus Terminal Road, the bus terminals were down there. I remember the wooden building and the benches. MR. MCDANIEL: Central Bus Station. MRS. CHARLES: When I was little, like at Glenwood, there were no blacks at all, because the town was geographically segregated anyway. I remember being fascinated because there were black people at the bus station. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: It wasn't a negative or a positive, it was just like I was just fascinated because I just hadn't seen anybody that looked like that before. I just remember that, it was so funny. MR. MCDANIEL: You finished at Glenwood and then, I guess, you went to Jefferson? MRS. CHARLES: I went to Jefferson, yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Jefferson, at that time, was ... MRS. CHARLES: It was above the old football field. MR. MCDANIEL: ... above the old football field, yeah. MRS. CHARLES: In fact, I was the last class to be in Jefferson. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, were you? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, because they moved it after that. They built the new school. MR. MCDANIEL: They built the new school. MRS. CHARLES: Right. I remember all those steps down to that track, because we would have to go, for gym, down to the track. I think most of the exercise was getting down there and back. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. I'm sure. I'm sure it was. Do you have any memories of middle school teachers, or maybe some adults that had an influence on you, or an impact on you from middle school? From Jefferson? MRS. CHARLES: I actually do. I think it was Mrs. Nolan. Okay, let me go back to elementary school. In those days, elementary school, they tracked the kids. The smarter kids were in one class and the medium kids were in another class and, I guess, the slower kids were in another class. They kind of divided you up. There wasn't the theory, now, that you mix everybody together. I was in the middle one and then my next door neighbor was Susie Ewing. Her mother was a kindergarten teacher at Glenwood for like forever. She was always in the faster class and I wanted so badly, because she was my best friend, to be in the same class as her, but they always put me in the middle one. I think that I daydreamed a lot. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. CHARLES: In fourth grade, I remember they moved me into Mrs. Gonzalez' class, up into the faster class, in the middle of the year, but I don't remember why. I know I was in Mrs. Sutherland's class and they moved me into Mrs. Gonzalez' class in the middle of the year. I was so confused the whole rest of the year because everybody always seemed to know what was going on and I had no clue. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, all right. MRS. CHARLES: After that, I was always in that class. I had Mrs. Burris and then Mrs. Washington. I remember Mrs. Burris won a mink coat once in some raffle, and she brought it to school and let us all wear it. MR. MCDANIEL: I guess, basically, the classes kind of stayed together as they moved from grade to grade? MRS. CHARLES: Right. We always had the same people in our class. MR. MCDANIEL: Perhaps there might've been a few adjustments, as people come and go, but not many people came and went back then. Once they got here, they were kind of here for a while, weren't they? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. I had the same people in my class after that, every single year. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Then you moved to middle, to Jefferson. MRS. CHARLES: I remember when Tim Vettle came. I think his father was the police chief for a while and we thought he was so dreamy. All of us, all the girls, were just crazy about him. I remember in fifth and sixth grade, we used to dance the Virginia reel for recess. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: I have no idea why we started doing that, but we thought it was so fun. We would go outside the school and all dance the Virginia reel. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, wow. MRS. CHARLES: Is that bizarre? MR. MCDANIEL: That's bizarre. Only in Oak Ridge. I guess that was part of being an Oak Ridger was there was a lot of different geographical influences in Oak Ridge, from all over the country. People did different things different ways and they brought them with them. You moved into the high school. What can you remember about high school? MRS. CHARLES: I think when I moved there, those round buildings that they tore down were new. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, were they? MRS. CHARLES: That was all exciting because we were in these new buildings. I think that's when they were starting the combined study classes which they do now. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. CHARLES: That was a big deal, though I never did take them. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? Were the round buildings, and I could be wrong, they weren't kind of that new open space theory of education was it? Or did you have classrooms? MRS. CHARLES: I don't think so. Yeah, we had classrooms. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, all right. MRS. CHARLES: We had classrooms in it. MR. MCDANIEL: What did you do in high school? What kind of activities were you involved in? MRS. CHARLES: I did some little bit of Masquers but I'd never do the acting. I was always like backstage person. I was in Girl Scouts from when I was a Brownie, all the way through high school. Well, it wasn't really cool to be in Girl Scouts. That was kind of strange. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. CHARLES: But we decided that we wanted to stay in Girl Scouts. We didn't have enough people, so we had to go recruit all of our friends to be Girl Scouts with us. We got all these people to join Girl Scouts in high school, which was really strange. We had a sailing and a hiking troop. The troop got to sail out at Concord Yacht Club. It was Mr. Dougherty or something, was one of our advisors. MR. MCDANIEL: Who was your Girl Scout leader? MRS. CHARLES: We had a couple of people that acted as our leaders because we kind of organized our own troop. It wasn't that somebody organized a troop for us, we decided we wanted to have a Girl Scouts troop and we kind of rounded up people to be our advisor leaders. We kind of just did our own thing. MR. MCDANIEL: Kind of did your own thing. MRS. CHARLES: We went backpacking and we went sailing. It was really fun. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you meet? MRS. CHARLES: Maybe at Chapel-on-the-Hill? MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: I think maybe at Chapel-on-the-Hill. MR. MCDANIEL: I remember Selma Shapiro, she had a group and I think they were down at the Wildcat Den. MRS. CHARLES: No, I'm thinking that we met at Chapel-on-the-Hill. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: Could be. I remember the Oak Ridge swimming pool and being so proud that it was the biggest pool in the South, or something. Since Mrs. Ewing across the street drove, and my mother didn't drive, and I think they had two cars, which was really strange. She would take all of the kids in the neighborhood to the swimming pool. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: I can't tell you how many kids we piled in one car. They had a Pontiac. They didn't have a Bonneville. They had the next size down. We could get a lot of kids in that car. We would have several kids deep in that car. She would take us almost every day to the swimming pool. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. Half the neighborhood. MR. MCDANIEL: During the summer. MRS. CHARLES: During the summer. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MRS. CHARLES: We never wore shoes in the summer. We always went barefoot and we burned our feet all the time. We cut our feet and we got stung by bees, all the time, but we didn't wear shoes. When I would go up to Pennsylvania to visit up at my grandmother's, they thought that we lived at the end of the Earth. That my father and mother were living in Tennessee was the most outrageous thing they ever heard and couldn't understand why they wanted to stay down here. They would ask us if we had a bathroom in our house and if we had any shoes. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. CHARLES: Really. It was pretty strange. MR. MCDANIEL: They thought you were a bunch of hillbillies. MRS. CHARLES: That was their picture of Tennessee. They didn't know anything else. There wasn't even an interstate to Pennsylvania then, we had to go just on the highways over the mountains. One of us always threw up. MR. MCDANIEL: Of course, of course. Absolutely. All right, let's go back to high school. You said that you had Girl Scouts and you did some Masquers. Did you have any teachers? Anybody that had an impact on you in high school? MRS. CHARLES: I don't think I ever did in junior high. It was Mrs. Nolan, because I hadn't been a great student and I didn't have a lot of confidence. She was my English teacher and she told me, I don't know, she just encouraged me a lot. After that, I think that she just gave me a lot of confidence in school. That was kind of nice. I don't know what ever became of her. I remember Eugene Pickle really well in high school. I don't know if I remember so many people, so many of my teachers. I had some strange ones, some were good, some were bad. I had Mr. Bilbery, he was interesting. MR. MCDANIEL: I didn't know him. MRS. CHARLES: Which is a funny story, because I had Mr. Bilbery for Chemistry and I think I scraped by with a D minus in Chemistry. We used to have what they called early classes at the high school. You didn't have to take an early class, you could come in later. Only if you wanted to take extra classes, you had what was called the early class, and you went in before the rest of the people came in for school. It was Chemistry and I fell asleep a lot of times in his class, that probably didn't contribute to passing it very well, but the weirdest thing was is that after I was grown, I went back to school. I had a Lyndhurst fellowship and I went back to school to learn to be a teacher. I did a fellowship at Oak Ridge High School, so I taught for a year on my fellowship, and I taught Chemistry and Biology. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you really? MRS. CHARLES: Strangely enough, and he was one of my advisors. He did not remember me, but I never, ever told him that I nearly failed his class. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh gosh, that's funny. That's funny. You graduated Oak Ridge High School and then what happened? MRS. CHARLES: Then I went to school at University of Kansas. MR. MCDANIEL: You did? Okay. MRS. CHARLES: In Lawrence. MR. MCDANIEL: Why there? MRS. CHARLES: Well, I didn't want to be here because when you're a teenager you just want to go on an adventure, and that was one place that let me in. Not everybody let me in. They had a good Art department and at that time I wanted to do Art, and so I went there, but eventually I decided I didn't want to do Art. I felt bad about paying out of state tuition stuff, and it wasn't as important to me anymore to be gone, so I came back to UT [University of Tennessee]. I transferred back to UT. Then I was sick for like a year, so I didn't ... I actually had bone cancer. I didn't go to school for a little while and then I went back to UT. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I got married and had a kid, and I was still going to school. Then we started moving all around Oak Ridge. We lived out in Loudon county for a while, and then we moved out to Midtown for a little while, then I moved to Rockwood. Then I moved back to Knoxville to Sutherland Avenue and, after like eight years or something, I finally finished college. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really? I can relate. MRS. CHARLES: I was pretty determined, in a way. I hung in there through two kids and eventually I finished. MR. MCDANIEL: Eventually you finished. Well, good. Good for you. Good for you. But you didn't get a degree in Art, you got a degree in? MRS. CHARLES: Zoology. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. You had these two children. Were you working? Did you get a job in your field or, after that? MRS. CHARLES: I didn't work at first because as soon as I graduated, we moved to Harriman. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: I really couldn't find a job in Zoology in Harriman, but we bought a house there. I don't know if you've met in your travels, the Farnhams? There is Ada and something Farnhams. MR. MCDANIEL: Of course I know Bill. MRS. CHARLES: They had sold us a house. They were from Harriman, or at least one of them was from Harriman. They sold us a house that they owned there that was a duplex, and it was actually an Oak Ridge house. It was the two ends of the E apartments, like the middle of E apartments are two stories, but the ends are one story. They took the two ends and put them together on a foundation. I guess they must've owned the house next door, so they took part of the lot and they put these two E apartments on there, but one side had burned down. They sold it to us and so we moved in the side that wasn't burned, and we had this whole plan. We were going to remodel it and rent it out. Just took a lot longer than we planned. MR. MCDANIEL: Where was it, what street was on? MRS. CHARLES: It was on Trenton Street. It was just a block or two up from Main Street, like right downtown Harriman. Just took us a little bit longer than we thought to remodel and redo it. We eventually actually finished it and moved out and did rent it out. That was our first rental house that we owned but it just took a long time to do it. We had to rebuild the whole side because it was burned. MR. MCDANIEL: What was your husband doing at this time? MRS. CHARLES: He did a couple different things. He was in that TAT [Training and Technology] program out at the plants where he learned to be an electrician. So he was an electrician for a while. Then he worked out actually at K-25 in the laundry. Then he got on as an electrical apprentice with the union. So he finished that electrical apprenticeship program and then he became a union electrician. He was doing that when we were out in Harriman. The only job I had there was, I walked in the cheese store one day and the man asked me if I wanted to sell cheese during the holidays for him. I have no idea why he asked me that, but then I did. MR. MCDANIEL: What was the cheese store? MRS. CHARLES: There was a Norris Creamery Cheese store on Main Street in Harriman. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? I don't remember that. I grew up in Roane County. MRS. CHARLES: Down in the basement there was like vats and all this cheese stuff. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, so you sold cheese. MRS. CHARLES: I sold cheese but I have no idea if I ... I was just in there to buy cheese. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. How funny. You were there, so how did you end up back in Oak Ridge? MRS. CHARLES: Okay, so we lived in Harriman and then we finally, finally remodeled that house and moved out. It was only a one bedroom and we had two kids, so it was a challenge. Of course, we had the rest of the house to put stuff in, and there was a basement under it and stuff, but it wasn't finished. We had a washer and dryer in the basement, we had to go outside, though, to go down there and stuff. Then we bought a house in Claxton, not too far from Bull Run Steam Plant there. We lived there when our kids were, well they went to elementary school in Harriman for a little while and then they went to Claxton Elementary out there. I did a lot of Girl Scouts out there. I did. In Harriman, actually, I was like the organizer for the Girl Scout troops in Harriman. I used to organize all the troops. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. CHARLES: Get leaders and get all the troops started. I used to do that for the Girl Scouts. It was just volunteer, that didn't pay anything, but I used to do that in Harriman. When I went to Claxton, I just helped be a leader for my daughter's Girl Scout troop there. So I did that, but then when my son was in middle school, he was very smart. I started feeling like I wasn't sure that the country schools could give him what he needed. They probably have more programs now, but then there wasn't a lot they could offer him, so we decided that we wanted to live in Oak Ridge so the kids could come back here, and go to school here. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. CHARLES: He was in middle school then, and Diana was going into sixth grade. We came and we moved to the house that we're in now. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Which is where? MRS. CHARLES: It's on Daniel Lane in Emory Heights. Actually kind of across from the middle school. It's across the street from Jefferson Middle School, it's very handy for them to go to school there. MR. MCDANIEL: I bet. Well, good. Good. MRS. CHARLES: I know that when Isaac started to Jefferson Middle School, they said they wanted to give him a test for his math placement. They said to me, "Don't worry if he misses a lot of things. We understand he's coming from a county school and stuff, and he may not, you know, be kind of up to speed here." He took the little math test that they gave him but he didn't miss anything on it. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Well. MRS. CHARLES: That was kind of funny. MR. MCDANIEL: That is kind of funny. You've been here ever since? MRS. CHARLES: We've been in that house, I guess, almost thirty years now. MR. MCDANIEL: Let's talk about your job, your work history, a little bit. MRS. CHARLES: Okay. MR. MCDANIEL: You worked a number of places around the area. MRS. CHARLES: The first real job I had was for a company called Repro Tech which doesn't exist anymore, but it was started by a- MR. MCDANIEL: Let's talk about your job history other than selling the cheese, there we go. I'm making a joke, I'm sorry. You can leave that out. MRS. CHARLES: This was a really strange job. It was a veterinarian started that in this area. Originally the offices were at Cedar Bluff, and I know this is hard to believe, but there was a farm at Cedar Bluff. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: There was already businesses and stuff out there, but there was still a farm down near Kingston Pike. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, yeah. MRS. CHARLES: Cedar Bluff and Kingston Pike. In fact, it was there until not really very long ago. It's pretty recent that they took it out. People never noticed it, but it was actually there. They did embryo transfer on cattle and that was something, the technique, had been developed in Oak Ridge, for freezing the embryos. We actually would take the embryos and freeze them, also, for later, for implanting in other cattle. I remember the technique was something they developed in Oak Ridge. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? Wow. MRS. CHARLES: It was a whole routine. You had to dehydrate the embryos and take them down through different steps of cold, and seed the ice crystals and all that. We did that with the cattle embryo. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MRS. CHARLES: That was a pretty strange job. We used to fly all over the country to big farms and ... MR. MCDANIEL: And impregnate. MRS. CHARLES: The cattle were given hormones to superovulate, so they'd give a lot of embryos. Then we would flush them out of the one cow, who was usually a very expensive important cow, and we would implant them in 10, 15 other cattle, who they gave hormones to, to synchronize them with the donor cow. So they'd all be in the same stage so that the embryos could be taken from one to the other. I know when you say embryos, you picture something, I don't know what you picture, like little baby cow or something, because we used to joke and stuff. Actually these were microscopic. We had to handle them under a microscope because you couldn't see them. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. CHARLES: That's how small they were. They weren't visible. We did everything under a microscope with these little teeny glass pipettes that we had to draw out really fine, because they were way too big to handle and move them around in dishes and stuff. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MRS. CHARLES: It was pretty crazy job. MR. MCDANIEL: That was, like you said, technology that was developed here at Oak Ridge. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, yeah. The technique for freezing the embryos was. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. What did you do next? MRS. CHARLES: What'd I do next? Next, I worked at Webb School and I was the science paraprofessional, they called it, but basically I did anything any of the science teachers wanted me to do. I ordered chemicals or whatever. I taught the lab, sometimes, too, for them, but I set up all the labs and I just whatever. All of the science teachers used me. That was a great job, because my kids were still in school and I was on a school schedule. I mean, it was like the perfect job for a mom with kids. It was a easy place to work, it was fine. Then I got a Lyndhurst fellowship and I went back to school for the summer, and did Master's level courses in Education and then I did the internship at Oak Ridge High School for a year. Then I got my teaching certificate, but I actually never taught. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: Other than that year of the internship, which I've always felt a little guilty about. MR. MCDANIEL: About what year was that? MRS. CHARLES: I don't know, 1985 or '86 or something like that. MR. MCDANIEL: Something like that, okay. MRS. CHARLES: I think I have a newspaper article somewhere because it says new teachers, you know, and it has my picture on there and stuff. MR. MCDANIEL: All right, well, good. Good. And then, from there? MRS. CHARLES: Then, I got a job at UT. They had a Microbiology lab and I worked there, just for really not even a whole year, and I had put a lot of applications out, so IT Corporation had called me about an interview but I was already working. I told them that I didn't want to interview. They called me back, but I don't know why, I guess my jobs are weird. They called me back and said could I please come in and interview anyway. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: It's like, "Okay. I'll come interview." Then they actually offered me so much money I just decided I really couldn't pass it up. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, I understand. MRS. CHARLES: I'd felt so bad about leaving the Microbiology lab because I was ... You know Professor Bass at UT? MR. MCDANIEL: Of course. MRS. CHARLES: The Forensic and whatever. One of my jobs was working for, on a different project, but for one of his graduate students. He would always bring Body Farm pictures in to show us, just to gross us out I think. MR. MCDANIEL: Of course. MRS. CHARLES: His name was Arpad Vass and he was in one of those Jefferson Bass books. He's actually a character in one of the books, too, because he uses his real name and everything, and puts him in the book. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, absolutely. MRS. CHARLES: That was one of the people I worked for, when I worked at the Microbiology lab, so that was kind of interesting. I also did some bacteria from TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority]. They had bacteria that grew in their pipe and their cooling systems, and they were IDing it and stuff. I worked on some of those projects. I felt bad because I was leaving and so I didn't want to leave them in a lurch, so I would work for IT at night and then I would go and work over there, I don't know, I worked both jobs for a while, until they could get settled. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Until they could get settled and figured it out. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: All right. We're going to pause for just a second and we'll change battery and then we'll continue on. MRS. CHARLES: Okay. [Break in video]
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so we were talking about your job and you were working IT at night and the lab during the day. MRS. CHARLES: Right. My IT job was a radiochemistry lab. It was out on Bear Creek Road, but the other end, not the end where Y-12 is. Actually, almost at K-25 there. I don't remember who started it now. It hadn't been there that long. Radiochemistry labs were pretty new and so it was interesting working there because sometimes we just kind of had to make things up because there wasn't any prior things to look at. Somebody said, "Well, I want a data package." Well, data packages for chemistry labs are pretty standardized things but we had to put one together for radiochemistry stuff, so we're kind of like, "Okay. We've got to make this up." Because there's nobody to show us how to do this. It was kind of fun. There was a man called Dale Chondra, and he's still around here, he actually referees sometimes at the football games. He's retired now, but he retired from Oak Ridge, not Oak Ridge Associated Universities but there was the Oak Ridge, I can't remember it now. The lab, there's a lab here. ORAU? MR. MCDANIEL: That's Oak Ridge Associated Universities. MRS. CHARLES: That's not it. MR. MCDANIEL: There's ORTEC, it used to be ORTEC. MRS. CHARLES: I don't think that's it. It might come to me later, anyway. Actually, he worked at that lab, but originally he worked in procedure development, so he would try to figure out different ways to do the radiochemistry stuff. I worked night shift for the first year I was there, so he would tell me what he wanted me to do that night and then I would leave him notes about what happened with the experiment the next day. That was kind of fun too. We were doing a lot of just standard samples over, and over, and over again, but it was kind of fun doing a little research stuff, too. Trying to figure out new methods and stuff for doing the analysis. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: So I did that at night and I worked there until they closed. They eventually closed that lab. We did a lot of work for some of the Superfund sites and stuff, and then they started cutting back on the amount of laboratory work they were requesting, and it kind of took away our market. Eventually they closed that lab and they still ran one, a chemistry lab, they had on at Middlebrook Pike, so I moved over to the chemistry lab, which was not radiochemistry. It was just standard chemistry. I worked there and they still were struggling, and eventually got laid off from there. That lab's still there now but it's TestAmerica now. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: Anyway, I worked temp jobs for about a year and then I got a job with the State of Tennessee, with the Department of Environment and Conservation. That office is on Emory Valley Road. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, yes. MRS. CHARLES: I worked there for three years, I guess, and it's their DOE oversight office. MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, right. MRS. CHARLES: So I was out on the reservation a lot, doing oversight stuff out there. We got to do- MR. MCDANIEL: Who was the fellow that ran that office forever? MRS. CHARLES: Oh, god. I'm so bad with names. MR. MCDANIEL: It's okay, because I've talked to him. I interviewed him and I can't remember his name. MRS. CHARLES: I know, and I know his name so well. MR. MCDANIEL: It's okay. MRS. CHARLES: Anyway. MR. MCDANIEL: So you were there for three years. MRS. CHARLES: I was there for three years. Wow. I just remember because I wasn't used to working in government and so that was a strange transition for me. I remember that they wanted to share their environmental monitoring reports between the different DOE Superfund sites, and I was supposed to coordinate that, and so I wrote them a letter that we would be sending our report to them. It was something totally nothing letter. A total nothing letter. I signed it and I got in so much trouble because I signed it. It's like, "You do not have the right to sign any letters that come out of this office. These all have to be approved by the director." Yeah. It's like, "Whoa. I'm sorry. I didn't understand that." You know? Just government stuff. I used to coordinate the NEPA reviews, the National Environmental Policy Act reviews, like if they wanted to do something out at the plant and it had to go through that whole process. MR. MCDANIEL: Assessment. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. I used to coordinate the review in the office between the different departments because we had like a radiological and a water and a something department, and they would all do their reviews and they would all contribute them, and then I had to compile them and put them together. I also coordinated with the governor's office because their economic review, and also the radiological review out of their radiological offices, we wanted to speak in one voice as the state, so we couldn't want to contradict each other. So I would coordinate with them to put together the state's opinion on the project. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. MRS. CHARLES: Our part would go into that, anyway. That was a kind of interesting job with the state. If we wanted to do something, we could do research and come up with our own projects, for just investigation or whatever, to make sure everything was okay. We did a lot of co-sampling, actually with DOE [Department of Energy], so when they would do their studies, we would accompany them and take part in them and stuff. We did fish stocking and stuff in East Fork Poplar Creek, and stuff like that, so. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MRS. CHARLES: Macro invertebrate studies, and things like that, to see about the health of the water and if it was improving, and all that. They used to do a goose roundup every year, and I guess, maybe, they still do it, but they catch the Canadian geese on the reservation when they're molting, so they're kind of flightless at that time. They grab them all and they do whole body scans on them. They don't kill them or anything, they put them in a box and do a whole body scan on them to see if they're picking up contaminates off of some of the waste ponds and stuff. Used to be open and they could get in them, so they would check to make sure that, because people would eat the geese, too. They would want to do a sample to see what the geese were getting into. I remember one year that one of their ponds, the flagging and stuff had gotten an old and it all gotten off the pond and stuff, and the geese were getting in there. It was a hot pond. Every goose was hot. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: Every goose. Usually everything was fine, but this year, this whole flock was just piping hot. Actually, the wildlife people came in and shot them, and killed them all, because they didn't want to let them loose. The geese are big, and they're hard to hold and they're heavy, and you take their heads and you tuck them under their wings so that they can't see anything and it calms them down. They scratch you, too. They bite you and scratch you, so you've got to hold their legs and you tuck their heads under their wings, and you've got to hold them. So I remember I was holding my hot goose and it got away. It left. It is like, "This isn't good." So, I don't know. Everybody was after the goose. MR. MCDANIEL: How funny. MRS. CHARLES: It was running away and it's like, "Don't let that goose get away." MR. MCDANIEL: That kind of reminds me of that story of all those frogs, those hot frogs, they used to have out there that get into those ponds. They'd hop all over the place and they were hot. MRS. CHARLES: I think they caught the goose later, but they never caught it that day. MR. MCDANIEL: It took off. MRS. CHARLES: He got a one day reprieve, or something, from death because I couldn't hold onto him. MR. MCDANIEL: All right, so after that job what did you do? We'll get finished here. MRS. CHARLES: I left there and went to Teledyne Brown Engineering, and that's where I'm at now. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: It was another radiochemistry lab. Their lab was in New Jersey and they were moving it down here. I think they were thinking that there would be opportunities for a radiochemistry lab here, and also because the cost of living is so much better down here than it is up there. It was a lot cheaper for them to operate a lab down here than it was in New Jersey. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, I understand. MRS. CHARLES: I used to have to fly into New Jersey and work up there, and come back down here and work. Eventually it moved down here and I've been there 16 years now, or something. We don't do any work for Oak Ridge. We do nothing. MR. MCDANIEL: Nothing for Oak Ridge. MRS. CHARLES: Nothing. It's not our clientele. We do most our work for nuclear power plants, so we do work for TVA but not for Oak Ridge. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, so what have I not asked you about that you want to talk about? You are a true Oak Ridger. True in the sense that everybody leaves for a little while, but they come back. You know? It seems like it. MRS. CHARLES: I remember so many things that it's funny, because people that live here now don’t know. I say, "Yeah, remember when the library was in Jackson Square?" That building is still there, but it's totally remodeled, but I remember going to the library in Jackson Square. I remember going to the movies, like next to Big Ed's there, that was a movie theater, and the drug store was Big Ed's. I remember all that. I remember a Valu-mart being in that same strip there, and we loved Valu-mart, that was like the best store ever. MR. MCDANIEL: Wasn't that the one you go in, and then there was these big old sets of steps that went into the basement? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, I think there was a basement, too. MR. MCDANIEL: And that was the bargain basement. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Because I remember… MRS. CHARLES: The whole store was a bargain store, yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, but I mean it was really the bargain basement. I just remember as a small kid, it was like you're going into the pit of hell. It was this big opening downstairs. It was wide steps with a railing down the middle. I remember that, for some reason. MRS. CHARLES: Coke machines were six cents there. I remember the Knitting Nook and the Laughing Monkey. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: I'm Jewish and the synagogue was down the street there at Michigan. We would have to go to Sunday school and we also went on Tuesdays and Thursdays to Hebrew school, but we would get a little break and we would all walk down to the Jackson Square Pharmacy and get candy. I remember that. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. MRS. CHARLES: That was like the best thing ever. Get those little wax Coke bottles. MR. MCDANIEL: The little wax Coke bottles. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. I remember doing that. Let's see what else I remember. There's just so many things. I went to Cotillion. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you? MRS. CHARLES: That was at Grove Center, there, was the Cotillion. I remember going there. That was in middle school. I guess my parents thought I should learn to dance. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Be a young lady. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MRS. CHARLES: When I was little, for one year I went to Roberta's School of Dance [Roberto’s], which I think it was on East Drive. There was a little shopping center on East Drive, which is a church or something now, and there was Roberta's School of Dance there. We did ballet. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you? MRS. CHARLES: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: I remember, for a year, I did ballet at Roberta's School of Dance. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MRS. CHARLES: We had a recital with pink tutus and did Waltz of the Flowers, I remember that. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MRS. CHARLES: I remember in second grade, I was walking home and coming up, I guess, I'm not sure what the road is that goes up to Andover. We used to cut through, and there were people that had a rope swing in their back yard, and we would go swing on the rope swing. I fell off one time and broke my arm. We were coming up on Andover and I was really starting to feel sick and I laid down on the curb. They ran home and they were going to go get my mother, who I thought was going to come save me, but my mother still couldn't drive. She walked down there and told me to stand up and we would walk home, and I thought, "This isn't being saved. This is no good at all. I could've walked home on my own." MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Without bothering your mother, and her being irritated by that. MRS. CHARLES: I don't know. I just played in the greenbelt a lot. That was fun. I remember it used to snow and we didn't have boots, and my mother put plastic bags over our shoes. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: Really. I don't know why we didn't have boots. I remember the house. I remember my dad, when he moved in that house on Euclid, all the rooms were painted really dark, like dark brown and dark red. I have no idea why, but they were painted that way. There was one closet room that was dark red and he never repainted it. We always called it the red room. MR. MCDANIEL: The red room. MRS. CHARLES: He said that the back yard was filled with liquor bottles, I remember that, too. I don't know who lived in the house before we did. MR. MCDANIEL: That would be interesting to find out. MRS. CHARLES: I remember the old coal furnace and that it would burp and we'd get soot in the house. The coal room, I remember where the coal chute was. They remodeled it and took all that out. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. MRS. CHARLES: I think everybody did. MR. MCDANIEL: That was a D house. That was right on the front, the coal chute. MRS. CHARLES: It was on the front of the house, yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Between the kitchen and the front door, that was the coal room right there. MRS. CHARLES: And the furnace was in there. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Well, my goodness. Well, thank you so much for coming and sharing your memories of Oak Ridge and telling us a little bit about your life. MRS. CHARLES: Sure. MR. MCDANIEL: All right, very good. Thank you. MRS. CHARLES: You're welcome.
[End of Interview]

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ORAL HISTORY OF REBECCA CHARLES
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
November 20, 2016
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is November 20, 2016. I am at my studio here in Oak Ridge, and today I'm speaking with Rebecca Charles. MRS. CHARLES: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: Rebecca, thank you for taking time on this Sunday afternoon to come over and talk with me. I appreciate it. MRS. CHARLES: Okay. MR. MCDANIEL: Now, I know that you said there are other people that would be much better telling your family's story than you, but I'm sure you'll be just fine. Let's start at the beginning. You were born in Oak Ridge, is that correct? MRS. CHARLES: Pretty much. MR. MCDANIEL: Pretty much. MRS. CHARLES: My parents lived here. For whatever reason, my mother's doctor was in Knoxville, so I was technically born at Baptist hospital in Knoxville. MR. MCDANIEL: I see. I see, but they lived here. MRS. CHARLES: But they lived here, and I've always lived here. MR. MCDANIEL: Why don't you tell me about before you were born. Why don't you tell me the story of your parents and how they ended up in Oak Ridge. MRS. CHARLES: They were both from around Washington, Pennsylvania. It's in western Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. They had already met there, and then my father was drafted into the Army. They both worked for the WPA [Works Program Administration]. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did they? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so this was in the '30s, I guess? MRS. CHARLES: Then my father was drafted into the Army and he was sent a couple different places for basic training and stuff, but eventually he volunteered, I think, to come to Oak Ridge. I don't think he had any clue where he was going. He came to Oak Ridge in the Army still. MR. MCDANIEL: In the Army? MRS. CHARLES: In the Army, yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Was he married? Were they married at this time? MRS. CHARLES: Yes, I believe they were already married. He later sent for my mother to come down, too. I remember her saying that she tried to call him and they told her there was no such place and she couldn't call him. They had eloped when they were in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, but they wanted to have a religious wedding, so I know that when they got back down here they got married again. MR. MCDANIEL: Did they? MRS. CHARLES: In Knoxville. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. MRS. CHARLES: It was about a year later they had a second wedding in Knoxville. MR. MCDANIEL: Your dad was in the service, in the military, when he came here, so I imagine he was a part of the Special Engineer Detachment. It's just what they called the thousand or so soldiers who were here working. Did he have a trade, or training in a specific area? MRS. CHARLES: He had a Bachelor's degree, and I know that they sent him for extra training because he went to Lehigh University and they did some extra training. It's in some of those documents that I brought, the training and the extra stuff he learned. He was an instrument technician and things like that, so he worked at K-25, at the Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Eventually, when the war ended, he went ahead and stayed there and worked for Union Carbide, who ran it, I guess, originally. He hired in with Union Carbide as a civilian, also, and then just went ahead and stayed here. He kind of worked his way up through the ranks and he eventually was Department Head of Field Services out at K-25. MR. MCDANIEL: What was your father's name? MRS. CHARLES: Nathan Landay. MR. MCDANIEL: Nathan Landay, okay. All right, did he stay at K-25 the rest of his career? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, he retired from there. They used to give these really fancy clocks out and somebody still has that clock [inaudible 00:03:44] they used to give you. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Do you remember about what year he retired? MRS. CHARLES: It was, I believe, in the '70s. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right, okay. Well good, good. Your parents came here, they lived in Oak Ridge, where did they first live when they came here? Do you remember? MRS. CHARLES: I know they talked about it, they must've lived out on West Outer or a couple different places before I was born. All of it was a room somewhere, or you know, a room in somebody else's apartment. None of it was very permanent or very ... MR. MCDANIEL: Or their own. MRS. CHARLES: Or their own. MR. MCDANIEL: Where were we? We were talking about ... MRS. CHARLES: Where my parents lived. MR. MCDANIEL: ... where your parents lived. Yeah, you said that they had found a place. They were living in other people's homes… MRS. CHARLES: Renting rooms in other- MR. MCDANIEL: …a room or something like that, yeah. MRS. CHARLES: I know my mother would say that they didn't have any laundry or anything. I remember her saying she had to wash the clothes in the bathtub. All they had was one little room. Sometimes a whole family would live in a house and there'd only be a couple bedrooms, and they'd still rent a room from them. Their extra room. I guess it was really hard to get somewhere to live. Eventually they wanted a house of their own and they couldn't get one in Oak Ridge, so they moved to Lenoir City. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: The letter I have says they moved to a FHA [Federal Housing Administration] house that was just being completed in Lenoir City. MR. MCDANIEL: The letter that you had, you were just telling me about the lady that ... Was that in Lenoir City or Oak Ridge? MRS. CHARLES: Oak Ridge was where they were living when the lady threw them out. MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me that story. MRS. CHARLES: Okay, so I just read the letter. They moved in. They had to leave their last house because somebody's mother was moving in with them, and they moved in with this woman whose husband's just left two weeks ago. She was renting out her extra room, partly because she's afraid without enough people living in the house, she's going to get thrown out. She had a three year old child. She told them all her troubles and they listened patiently to her. Then the next day, she came and told them that they're going to have to move again, because she's been to the psychiatrist and he said that with everything that was going on, she needed to settle her nerves and come home to an empty house. I guess they had only been there a day or two, and just moved, and so my dad says they needed to get their own house this time because they're not going to do that anymore. MR. MCDANIEL: They're not going to do that again. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: How funny. Okay, so we're going to start over with your Dewey Road to Euclid. MRS. CHARLES: Okay, so we lived on Dewey Road and, like I said, I have lots of pictures because Ed Westcott, I think he lived on Delaware maybe, and they were friends with my dad. I used to play with their son. I can't remember a lot because I was only three or four years old. I remember a little bit when I was three. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. MRS. CHARLES: I remember some of it. Then we moved to Euclid Circle. MR. MCDANIEL: In about '54 or so? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, I think about '54. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: Somewhere around there. '54 or '55, because it was before I started to school, so I would've been four or something when we moved there. Then the houses went up for sale. There was a whole story about my dad was going to go on vacation and he was so worried that he wouldn't get to buy the house, and he really wanted to buy it, so he talked them into coming in early and selling it to him. That's how he ended up buying it before anybody else- MR. MCDANIEL: So he was the first person in Oak Ridge to purchase one of the government homes? MRS. CHARLES: That was the story. There was the newspaper article that you saw. MR. MCDANIEL: You brought me a newspaper article that had a big picture of him signing the contract, and whatever, to the house. MRS. CHARLES: I'm sure he paid cash, because my dad grew up in the Depression and there was no way he could stand to owe money. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, he did because I read that in the article that he paid cash for the house. It went on to talk, in the article, about he was leaving the next day but he didn't want to leave without getting home insurance on it. MRS. CHARLES: Right. MR. MCDANIEL: So he purchased the first house insurance policy in Oak Ridge. MRS. CHARLES: That's pretty cool, too. MR. MCDANIEL: From Red Williams Insurance Agency. MRS. CHARLES: I remember them coming and taking the pictures they had in the paper about him buying the house. The only one that's in that, that was the anniversary I showed you, so there's only him. I remember that they came and took pictures of me. You know the little tractor that you have outside? MR. MCDANIEL: Yes. MRS. CHARLES: I was sitting on my little tractor in front of our house that we had just bought when they came. MR. MCDANIEL: The little John Deere tractor. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, and they came and took it. Ours was red. MR. MCDANIEL: Was it? I think ours was red, too, originally. MRS. CHARLES: They came and took my picture on my, I remember that, sitting on my tractor outside. I'm not even sure I realized why they were taking my picture but I still thought it was really exciting. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This house, what was the address? MRS. CHARLES: 122 Euclid Circle. It's off East Drive. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, 122 Euclid Circle. Did you grow up in that home? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, we never moved from that house. He died in 2010 and that's where he lived when he died. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. He was 97 when he died and he still lived in that house. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Wow. Let's kind of switch over a little bit to you. Let's talk a little bit about growing up in Oak Ridge. What was it like for you? MRS. CHARLES: I don't think that I would've known that it wasn't typical because, you know, you're a kid and everything just is how it is. You don't question anything, you just accept life. I do remember, looking back, certain things that were probably unusual in that everybody was around the same age that came to the city. They were all fairly young. So that on my street, on Euclid, almost every single house had a kid within a year of my age. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. CHARLES: We had this huge gang of kids that would hang out and, since we lived on a circle, we were out in the street a lot because there wasn't much traffic. Plus the fact that most people just had one car, so once the husband went to work, or whatever, there weren't too many cars around anyway. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. CHARLES: I mean, I remember a lot of the stuff that we did. I mean, we had huge hide-and-seek games and we had kick-the-can games. There was like a fort down in the woods that the kids built, down in the green belt, and everybody would go down there. We played foursquare out in the street, and then when a car would come in, everybody would yell at us and tell us we couldn't play in the street. As soon as the car left we'd go back out in the street and play again. We'd have big jump rope things going all the time. There were so many kids that it's almost like you only played with your grade, because- MR. MCDANIEL: There was plenty. MRS. CHARLES: There was plenty, so you wouldn't play with a different grade than you, like one higher or one lower. You just played with your grade. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you go to school? MRS. CHARLES: I went to Glenwood. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so you went to Glenwood. MRS. CHARLES: I remember that, I think when I was in kindergarten, the bus would pick us up, maybe, but we had to walk out to East Drive later, I know, to go get the bus. We had to walk around the circle and walk out, but most of us would walk to school. MR. MCDANIEL: It wasn't that far from where you were. MRS. CHARLES: It was about a mile if you went on East Drive, but if you went down to the end on Euclid place, there was a path there and it was graveled. It went down to Andover. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: On the roads, it's a long ways apart but, geographically, they're actually right next to each other. There's just like a yard. The two yards hit each other from Andover and Euclid Place. We'd go that way and then cut down, and then eventually somebody who lived in that house figured out that that graveled path was not publicly owned. It was actually on their property. So they closed it off and they wouldn't let us go through there anymore. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, so then we had to go all the way around. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, that's not very nice. I remember when I walked to elementary school, we had a path and it went through a bunch of people's yards. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. They put a fence up and they didn't let us go through anymore. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, wow. MRS. CHARLES: Another thing that I remember, and I didn't understand it, I was little, but there were all that we called ball fields. My brothers actually went and played baseball down on the "ball fields" but they weren't really ball fields. MR. MCDANIEL: They were just big fields, weren't they? MRS. CHARLES: They were the spoils area, I think, from where they took the dirt and stuff for the construction. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MRS. CHARLES: So they dug out for the construction and they left a big muddy flat, with usually a hill of dirt behind it. So it was perfect for playing ball because the pitcher could throw it and it wouldn't go anywhere, because it could hit the wall of dirt. Then they could put out the bases and it was all nice and flat, and stuff. MR. MCDANIEL: Where was the one that was nearest you? MRS. CHARLES: It was between Euclid and East Drive. MR. MCDANIEL: Was it? MRS. CHARLES: But there was more of them, because we called them ball field one, ball field two, ball field three. Yeah, we had names for them. That was the ball field one, and I don't think we ever actually used any of the other ones for ball fields. I don't think they actually ever were ball fields, but just because they looked like the one we used, we called them ball fields. We always called them ball fields. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, wow. Sounds like growing up in Oak Ridge was just a big time. MRS. CHARLES: I guess it was- MR. MCDANIEL: Typical. MRS. CHARLES: I guess it was good. It was in the days when you didn't ever lock your house. We locked our house when we went on vacation, and my dad always turned off the water at the street with the ... MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really? Did he? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. Yeah, he would never leave the water on in the house when we went on vacation, so he always did that. MR. MCDANIEL: I wonder why. I wonder if that was something that, when he was growing up, that he learned to do. Maybe when he was growing up he had a flood because they didn't do that, or something, or knew somebody. MRS. CHARLES: I don't know. He always turned our water off when we went on vacation. It is kind of strange. MR. MCDANIEL: That is kind of strange. MRS. CHARLES: But, of course, I thought that was normal, too. MR. MCDANIEL: Of course. Of course. Did your mother work outside the home, or did she just take care of the kids? MRS. CHARLES: My mother worked when they first came to Oak Ridge, and she was secretary, stenographer, and she was very, very good. I think that she was a secretary to someone important at K-25 but I don't remember who. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? Okay. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. Yeah, she was very fast, and very good, and she was very smart. She hadn't gone to college because her family was poor and she had to go to work when she finished school, but she actually graduated first in her high school. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MRS. CHARLES: But she couldn't go on. Later on, when I was maybe in college, maybe starting a little before there ... She actually started working when I was middle school, and she worked at RSIC, Radiation Shielding Information Center, out at X-10. Her boss was Betty Moskowitz . She was a secretary out there, and then she decided she'd go back to college. She went back to UT [University of Tennessee] and she finished a Bachelor's degree in English, eventually. I mean she went part-time for a while. She was a very smart lady, and so they invited her to join Phi Beta Kappa. She told the story that she goes to join Phi Beta Kappa, and they tell her that, "Excuse me. The parents are supposed to be in the other room." MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? How fun. MRS. CHARLES: She said, "I'm the one being inducted." Anyway, that's her story. MR. MCDANIEL: That's funny. I guess that was fairly common, to a certain degree. Same thing happened with my mother. She stayed at home until we were in high school and then she went back to work. She ended up working at the Lab and got her Bachelor's degree, I think, at 61. Something like that, you know. She wanted to do that. MRS. CHARLES: She always wanted to do that. That was a really big thing, for her to get to go to school. MR. MCDANIEL: But she stayed home while you kids were growing up? MRS. CHARLES: When we were little, she stayed home. My mother could not drive. When she came to Oak Ridge, she'd never had a car and she didn't know how to drive. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: I remember taking buses. There used to be buses in Oak Ridge. I remember the old bus, I guess it's Bus Terminal Road, the bus terminals were down there. I remember the wooden building and the benches. MR. MCDANIEL: Central Bus Station. MRS. CHARLES: When I was little, like at Glenwood, there were no blacks at all, because the town was geographically segregated anyway. I remember being fascinated because there were black people at the bus station. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: It wasn't a negative or a positive, it was just like I was just fascinated because I just hadn't seen anybody that looked like that before. I just remember that, it was so funny. MR. MCDANIEL: You finished at Glenwood and then, I guess, you went to Jefferson? MRS. CHARLES: I went to Jefferson, yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Jefferson, at that time, was ... MRS. CHARLES: It was above the old football field. MR. MCDANIEL: ... above the old football field, yeah. MRS. CHARLES: In fact, I was the last class to be in Jefferson. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, were you? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, because they moved it after that. They built the new school. MR. MCDANIEL: They built the new school. MRS. CHARLES: Right. I remember all those steps down to that track, because we would have to go, for gym, down to the track. I think most of the exercise was getting down there and back. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. I'm sure. I'm sure it was. Do you have any memories of middle school teachers, or maybe some adults that had an influence on you, or an impact on you from middle school? From Jefferson? MRS. CHARLES: I actually do. I think it was Mrs. Nolan. Okay, let me go back to elementary school. In those days, elementary school, they tracked the kids. The smarter kids were in one class and the medium kids were in another class and, I guess, the slower kids were in another class. They kind of divided you up. There wasn't the theory, now, that you mix everybody together. I was in the middle one and then my next door neighbor was Susie Ewing. Her mother was a kindergarten teacher at Glenwood for like forever. She was always in the faster class and I wanted so badly, because she was my best friend, to be in the same class as her, but they always put me in the middle one. I think that I daydreamed a lot. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. CHARLES: In fourth grade, I remember they moved me into Mrs. Gonzalez' class, up into the faster class, in the middle of the year, but I don't remember why. I know I was in Mrs. Sutherland's class and they moved me into Mrs. Gonzalez' class in the middle of the year. I was so confused the whole rest of the year because everybody always seemed to know what was going on and I had no clue. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, all right. MRS. CHARLES: After that, I was always in that class. I had Mrs. Burris and then Mrs. Washington. I remember Mrs. Burris won a mink coat once in some raffle, and she brought it to school and let us all wear it. MR. MCDANIEL: I guess, basically, the classes kind of stayed together as they moved from grade to grade? MRS. CHARLES: Right. We always had the same people in our class. MR. MCDANIEL: Perhaps there might've been a few adjustments, as people come and go, but not many people came and went back then. Once they got here, they were kind of here for a while, weren't they? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. I had the same people in my class after that, every single year. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Then you moved to middle, to Jefferson. MRS. CHARLES: I remember when Tim Vettle came. I think his father was the police chief for a while and we thought he was so dreamy. All of us, all the girls, were just crazy about him. I remember in fifth and sixth grade, we used to dance the Virginia reel for recess. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: I have no idea why we started doing that, but we thought it was so fun. We would go outside the school and all dance the Virginia reel. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, wow. MRS. CHARLES: Is that bizarre? MR. MCDANIEL: That's bizarre. Only in Oak Ridge. I guess that was part of being an Oak Ridger was there was a lot of different geographical influences in Oak Ridge, from all over the country. People did different things different ways and they brought them with them. You moved into the high school. What can you remember about high school? MRS. CHARLES: I think when I moved there, those round buildings that they tore down were new. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, were they? MRS. CHARLES: That was all exciting because we were in these new buildings. I think that's when they were starting the combined study classes which they do now. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. CHARLES: That was a big deal, though I never did take them. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? Were the round buildings, and I could be wrong, they weren't kind of that new open space theory of education was it? Or did you have classrooms? MRS. CHARLES: I don't think so. Yeah, we had classrooms. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, all right. MRS. CHARLES: We had classrooms in it. MR. MCDANIEL: What did you do in high school? What kind of activities were you involved in? MRS. CHARLES: I did some little bit of Masquers but I'd never do the acting. I was always like backstage person. I was in Girl Scouts from when I was a Brownie, all the way through high school. Well, it wasn't really cool to be in Girl Scouts. That was kind of strange. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. CHARLES: But we decided that we wanted to stay in Girl Scouts. We didn't have enough people, so we had to go recruit all of our friends to be Girl Scouts with us. We got all these people to join Girl Scouts in high school, which was really strange. We had a sailing and a hiking troop. The troop got to sail out at Concord Yacht Club. It was Mr. Dougherty or something, was one of our advisors. MR. MCDANIEL: Who was your Girl Scout leader? MRS. CHARLES: We had a couple of people that acted as our leaders because we kind of organized our own troop. It wasn't that somebody organized a troop for us, we decided we wanted to have a Girl Scouts troop and we kind of rounded up people to be our advisor leaders. We kind of just did our own thing. MR. MCDANIEL: Kind of did your own thing. MRS. CHARLES: We went backpacking and we went sailing. It was really fun. MR. MCDANIEL: Where did you meet? MRS. CHARLES: Maybe at Chapel-on-the-Hill? MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: I think maybe at Chapel-on-the-Hill. MR. MCDANIEL: I remember Selma Shapiro, she had a group and I think they were down at the Wildcat Den. MRS. CHARLES: No, I'm thinking that we met at Chapel-on-the-Hill. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: Could be. I remember the Oak Ridge swimming pool and being so proud that it was the biggest pool in the South, or something. Since Mrs. Ewing across the street drove, and my mother didn't drive, and I think they had two cars, which was really strange. She would take all of the kids in the neighborhood to the swimming pool. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: I can't tell you how many kids we piled in one car. They had a Pontiac. They didn't have a Bonneville. They had the next size down. We could get a lot of kids in that car. We would have several kids deep in that car. She would take us almost every day to the swimming pool. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. Half the neighborhood. MR. MCDANIEL: During the summer. MRS. CHARLES: During the summer. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MRS. CHARLES: We never wore shoes in the summer. We always went barefoot and we burned our feet all the time. We cut our feet and we got stung by bees, all the time, but we didn't wear shoes. When I would go up to Pennsylvania to visit up at my grandmother's, they thought that we lived at the end of the Earth. That my father and mother were living in Tennessee was the most outrageous thing they ever heard and couldn't understand why they wanted to stay down here. They would ask us if we had a bathroom in our house and if we had any shoes. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? MRS. CHARLES: Really. It was pretty strange. MR. MCDANIEL: They thought you were a bunch of hillbillies. MRS. CHARLES: That was their picture of Tennessee. They didn't know anything else. There wasn't even an interstate to Pennsylvania then, we had to go just on the highways over the mountains. One of us always threw up. MR. MCDANIEL: Of course, of course. Absolutely. All right, let's go back to high school. You said that you had Girl Scouts and you did some Masquers. Did you have any teachers? Anybody that had an impact on you in high school? MRS. CHARLES: I don't think I ever did in junior high. It was Mrs. Nolan, because I hadn't been a great student and I didn't have a lot of confidence. She was my English teacher and she told me, I don't know, she just encouraged me a lot. After that, I think that she just gave me a lot of confidence in school. That was kind of nice. I don't know what ever became of her. I remember Eugene Pickle really well in high school. I don't know if I remember so many people, so many of my teachers. I had some strange ones, some were good, some were bad. I had Mr. Bilbery, he was interesting. MR. MCDANIEL: I didn't know him. MRS. CHARLES: Which is a funny story, because I had Mr. Bilbery for Chemistry and I think I scraped by with a D minus in Chemistry. We used to have what they called early classes at the high school. You didn't have to take an early class, you could come in later. Only if you wanted to take extra classes, you had what was called the early class, and you went in before the rest of the people came in for school. It was Chemistry and I fell asleep a lot of times in his class, that probably didn't contribute to passing it very well, but the weirdest thing was is that after I was grown, I went back to school. I had a Lyndhurst fellowship and I went back to school to learn to be a teacher. I did a fellowship at Oak Ridge High School, so I taught for a year on my fellowship, and I taught Chemistry and Biology. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you really? MRS. CHARLES: Strangely enough, and he was one of my advisors. He did not remember me, but I never, ever told him that I nearly failed his class. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh gosh, that's funny. That's funny. You graduated Oak Ridge High School and then what happened? MRS. CHARLES: Then I went to school at University of Kansas. MR. MCDANIEL: You did? Okay. MRS. CHARLES: In Lawrence. MR. MCDANIEL: Why there? MRS. CHARLES: Well, I didn't want to be here because when you're a teenager you just want to go on an adventure, and that was one place that let me in. Not everybody let me in. They had a good Art department and at that time I wanted to do Art, and so I went there, but eventually I decided I didn't want to do Art. I felt bad about paying out of state tuition stuff, and it wasn't as important to me anymore to be gone, so I came back to UT [University of Tennessee]. I transferred back to UT. Then I was sick for like a year, so I didn't ... I actually had bone cancer. I didn't go to school for a little while and then I went back to UT. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I got married and had a kid, and I was still going to school. Then we started moving all around Oak Ridge. We lived out in Loudon county for a while, and then we moved out to Midtown for a little while, then I moved to Rockwood. Then I moved back to Knoxville to Sutherland Avenue and, after like eight years or something, I finally finished college. MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really? I can relate. MRS. CHARLES: I was pretty determined, in a way. I hung in there through two kids and eventually I finished. MR. MCDANIEL: Eventually you finished. Well, good. Good for you. Good for you. But you didn't get a degree in Art, you got a degree in? MRS. CHARLES: Zoology. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. You had these two children. Were you working? Did you get a job in your field or, after that? MRS. CHARLES: I didn't work at first because as soon as I graduated, we moved to Harriman. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: I really couldn't find a job in Zoology in Harriman, but we bought a house there. I don't know if you've met in your travels, the Farnhams? There is Ada and something Farnhams. MR. MCDANIEL: Of course I know Bill. MRS. CHARLES: They had sold us a house. They were from Harriman, or at least one of them was from Harriman. They sold us a house that they owned there that was a duplex, and it was actually an Oak Ridge house. It was the two ends of the E apartments, like the middle of E apartments are two stories, but the ends are one story. They took the two ends and put them together on a foundation. I guess they must've owned the house next door, so they took part of the lot and they put these two E apartments on there, but one side had burned down. They sold it to us and so we moved in the side that wasn't burned, and we had this whole plan. We were going to remodel it and rent it out. Just took a lot longer than we planned. MR. MCDANIEL: Where was it, what street was on? MRS. CHARLES: It was on Trenton Street. It was just a block or two up from Main Street, like right downtown Harriman. Just took us a little bit longer than we thought to remodel and redo it. We eventually actually finished it and moved out and did rent it out. That was our first rental house that we owned but it just took a long time to do it. We had to rebuild the whole side because it was burned. MR. MCDANIEL: What was your husband doing at this time? MRS. CHARLES: He did a couple different things. He was in that TAT [Training and Technology] program out at the plants where he learned to be an electrician. So he was an electrician for a while. Then he worked out actually at K-25 in the laundry. Then he got on as an electrical apprentice with the union. So he finished that electrical apprenticeship program and then he became a union electrician. He was doing that when we were out in Harriman. The only job I had there was, I walked in the cheese store one day and the man asked me if I wanted to sell cheese during the holidays for him. I have no idea why he asked me that, but then I did. MR. MCDANIEL: What was the cheese store? MRS. CHARLES: There was a Norris Creamery Cheese store on Main Street in Harriman. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? I don't remember that. I grew up in Roane County. MRS. CHARLES: Down in the basement there was like vats and all this cheese stuff. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, so you sold cheese. MRS. CHARLES: I sold cheese but I have no idea if I ... I was just in there to buy cheese. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. How funny. You were there, so how did you end up back in Oak Ridge? MRS. CHARLES: Okay, so we lived in Harriman and then we finally, finally remodeled that house and moved out. It was only a one bedroom and we had two kids, so it was a challenge. Of course, we had the rest of the house to put stuff in, and there was a basement under it and stuff, but it wasn't finished. We had a washer and dryer in the basement, we had to go outside, though, to go down there and stuff. Then we bought a house in Claxton, not too far from Bull Run Steam Plant there. We lived there when our kids were, well they went to elementary school in Harriman for a little while and then they went to Claxton Elementary out there. I did a lot of Girl Scouts out there. I did. In Harriman, actually, I was like the organizer for the Girl Scout troops in Harriman. I used to organize all the troops. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. MRS. CHARLES: Get leaders and get all the troops started. I used to do that for the Girl Scouts. It was just volunteer, that didn't pay anything, but I used to do that in Harriman. When I went to Claxton, I just helped be a leader for my daughter's Girl Scout troop there. So I did that, but then when my son was in middle school, he was very smart. I started feeling like I wasn't sure that the country schools could give him what he needed. They probably have more programs now, but then there wasn't a lot they could offer him, so we decided that we wanted to live in Oak Ridge so the kids could come back here, and go to school here. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. CHARLES: He was in middle school then, and Diana was going into sixth grade. We came and we moved to the house that we're in now. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. Which is where? MRS. CHARLES: It's on Daniel Lane in Emory Heights. Actually kind of across from the middle school. It's across the street from Jefferson Middle School, it's very handy for them to go to school there. MR. MCDANIEL: I bet. Well, good. Good. MRS. CHARLES: I know that when Isaac started to Jefferson Middle School, they said they wanted to give him a test for his math placement. They said to me, "Don't worry if he misses a lot of things. We understand he's coming from a county school and stuff, and he may not, you know, be kind of up to speed here." He took the little math test that they gave him but he didn't miss anything on it. MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Well. MRS. CHARLES: That was kind of funny. MR. MCDANIEL: That is kind of funny. You've been here ever since? MRS. CHARLES: We've been in that house, I guess, almost thirty years now. MR. MCDANIEL: Let's talk about your job, your work history, a little bit. MRS. CHARLES: Okay. MR. MCDANIEL: You worked a number of places around the area. MRS. CHARLES: The first real job I had was for a company called Repro Tech which doesn't exist anymore, but it was started by a- MR. MCDANIEL: Let's talk about your job history other than selling the cheese, there we go. I'm making a joke, I'm sorry. You can leave that out. MRS. CHARLES: This was a really strange job. It was a veterinarian started that in this area. Originally the offices were at Cedar Bluff, and I know this is hard to believe, but there was a farm at Cedar Bluff. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: There was already businesses and stuff out there, but there was still a farm down near Kingston Pike. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, yeah. MRS. CHARLES: Cedar Bluff and Kingston Pike. In fact, it was there until not really very long ago. It's pretty recent that they took it out. People never noticed it, but it was actually there. They did embryo transfer on cattle and that was something, the technique, had been developed in Oak Ridge, for freezing the embryos. We actually would take the embryos and freeze them, also, for later, for implanting in other cattle. I remember the technique was something they developed in Oak Ridge. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? Wow. MRS. CHARLES: It was a whole routine. You had to dehydrate the embryos and take them down through different steps of cold, and seed the ice crystals and all that. We did that with the cattle embryo. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MRS. CHARLES: That was a pretty strange job. We used to fly all over the country to big farms and ... MR. MCDANIEL: And impregnate. MRS. CHARLES: The cattle were given hormones to superovulate, so they'd give a lot of embryos. Then we would flush them out of the one cow, who was usually a very expensive important cow, and we would implant them in 10, 15 other cattle, who they gave hormones to, to synchronize them with the donor cow. So they'd all be in the same stage so that the embryos could be taken from one to the other. I know when you say embryos, you picture something, I don't know what you picture, like little baby cow or something, because we used to joke and stuff. Actually these were microscopic. We had to handle them under a microscope because you couldn't see them. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. MRS. CHARLES: That's how small they were. They weren't visible. We did everything under a microscope with these little teeny glass pipettes that we had to draw out really fine, because they were way too big to handle and move them around in dishes and stuff. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MRS. CHARLES: It was pretty crazy job. MR. MCDANIEL: That was, like you said, technology that was developed here at Oak Ridge. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, yeah. The technique for freezing the embryos was. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. What did you do next? MRS. CHARLES: What'd I do next? Next, I worked at Webb School and I was the science paraprofessional, they called it, but basically I did anything any of the science teachers wanted me to do. I ordered chemicals or whatever. I taught the lab, sometimes, too, for them, but I set up all the labs and I just whatever. All of the science teachers used me. That was a great job, because my kids were still in school and I was on a school schedule. I mean, it was like the perfect job for a mom with kids. It was a easy place to work, it was fine. Then I got a Lyndhurst fellowship and I went back to school for the summer, and did Master's level courses in Education and then I did the internship at Oak Ridge High School for a year. Then I got my teaching certificate, but I actually never taught. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: Other than that year of the internship, which I've always felt a little guilty about. MR. MCDANIEL: About what year was that? MRS. CHARLES: I don't know, 1985 or '86 or something like that. MR. MCDANIEL: Something like that, okay. MRS. CHARLES: I think I have a newspaper article somewhere because it says new teachers, you know, and it has my picture on there and stuff. MR. MCDANIEL: All right, well, good. Good. And then, from there? MRS. CHARLES: Then, I got a job at UT. They had a Microbiology lab and I worked there, just for really not even a whole year, and I had put a lot of applications out, so IT Corporation had called me about an interview but I was already working. I told them that I didn't want to interview. They called me back, but I don't know why, I guess my jobs are weird. They called me back and said could I please come in and interview anyway. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: It's like, "Okay. I'll come interview." Then they actually offered me so much money I just decided I really couldn't pass it up. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, I understand. MRS. CHARLES: I'd felt so bad about leaving the Microbiology lab because I was ... You know Professor Bass at UT? MR. MCDANIEL: Of course. MRS. CHARLES: The Forensic and whatever. One of my jobs was working for, on a different project, but for one of his graduate students. He would always bring Body Farm pictures in to show us, just to gross us out I think. MR. MCDANIEL: Of course. MRS. CHARLES: His name was Arpad Vass and he was in one of those Jefferson Bass books. He's actually a character in one of the books, too, because he uses his real name and everything, and puts him in the book. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, absolutely. MRS. CHARLES: That was one of the people I worked for, when I worked at the Microbiology lab, so that was kind of interesting. I also did some bacteria from TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority]. They had bacteria that grew in their pipe and their cooling systems, and they were IDing it and stuff. I worked on some of those projects. I felt bad because I was leaving and so I didn't want to leave them in a lurch, so I would work for IT at night and then I would go and work over there, I don't know, I worked both jobs for a while, until they could get settled. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Until they could get settled and figured it out. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: All right. We're going to pause for just a second and we'll change battery and then we'll continue on. MRS. CHARLES: Okay. [Break in video]
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so we were talking about your job and you were working IT at night and the lab during the day. MRS. CHARLES: Right. My IT job was a radiochemistry lab. It was out on Bear Creek Road, but the other end, not the end where Y-12 is. Actually, almost at K-25 there. I don't remember who started it now. It hadn't been there that long. Radiochemistry labs were pretty new and so it was interesting working there because sometimes we just kind of had to make things up because there wasn't any prior things to look at. Somebody said, "Well, I want a data package." Well, data packages for chemistry labs are pretty standardized things but we had to put one together for radiochemistry stuff, so we're kind of like, "Okay. We've got to make this up." Because there's nobody to show us how to do this. It was kind of fun. There was a man called Dale Chondra, and he's still around here, he actually referees sometimes at the football games. He's retired now, but he retired from Oak Ridge, not Oak Ridge Associated Universities but there was the Oak Ridge, I can't remember it now. The lab, there's a lab here. ORAU? MR. MCDANIEL: That's Oak Ridge Associated Universities. MRS. CHARLES: That's not it. MR. MCDANIEL: There's ORTEC, it used to be ORTEC. MRS. CHARLES: I don't think that's it. It might come to me later, anyway. Actually, he worked at that lab, but originally he worked in procedure development, so he would try to figure out different ways to do the radiochemistry stuff. I worked night shift for the first year I was there, so he would tell me what he wanted me to do that night and then I would leave him notes about what happened with the experiment the next day. That was kind of fun too. We were doing a lot of just standard samples over, and over, and over again, but it was kind of fun doing a little research stuff, too. Trying to figure out new methods and stuff for doing the analysis. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: So I did that at night and I worked there until they closed. They eventually closed that lab. We did a lot of work for some of the Superfund sites and stuff, and then they started cutting back on the amount of laboratory work they were requesting, and it kind of took away our market. Eventually they closed that lab and they still ran one, a chemistry lab, they had on at Middlebrook Pike, so I moved over to the chemistry lab, which was not radiochemistry. It was just standard chemistry. I worked there and they still were struggling, and eventually got laid off from there. That lab's still there now but it's TestAmerica now. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: Anyway, I worked temp jobs for about a year and then I got a job with the State of Tennessee, with the Department of Environment and Conservation. That office is on Emory Valley Road. MR. MCDANIEL: Right, yes. MRS. CHARLES: I worked there for three years, I guess, and it's their DOE oversight office. MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, right. MRS. CHARLES: So I was out on the reservation a lot, doing oversight stuff out there. We got to do- MR. MCDANIEL: Who was the fellow that ran that office forever? MRS. CHARLES: Oh, god. I'm so bad with names. MR. MCDANIEL: It's okay, because I've talked to him. I interviewed him and I can't remember his name. MRS. CHARLES: I know, and I know his name so well. MR. MCDANIEL: It's okay. MRS. CHARLES: Anyway. MR. MCDANIEL: So you were there for three years. MRS. CHARLES: I was there for three years. Wow. I just remember because I wasn't used to working in government and so that was a strange transition for me. I remember that they wanted to share their environmental monitoring reports between the different DOE Superfund sites, and I was supposed to coordinate that, and so I wrote them a letter that we would be sending our report to them. It was something totally nothing letter. A total nothing letter. I signed it and I got in so much trouble because I signed it. It's like, "You do not have the right to sign any letters that come out of this office. These all have to be approved by the director." Yeah. It's like, "Whoa. I'm sorry. I didn't understand that." You know? Just government stuff. I used to coordinate the NEPA reviews, the National Environmental Policy Act reviews, like if they wanted to do something out at the plant and it had to go through that whole process. MR. MCDANIEL: Assessment. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. I used to coordinate the review in the office between the different departments because we had like a radiological and a water and a something department, and they would all do their reviews and they would all contribute them, and then I had to compile them and put them together. I also coordinated with the governor's office because their economic review, and also the radiological review out of their radiological offices, we wanted to speak in one voice as the state, so we couldn't want to contradict each other. So I would coordinate with them to put together the state's opinion on the project. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. MRS. CHARLES: Our part would go into that, anyway. That was a kind of interesting job with the state. If we wanted to do something, we could do research and come up with our own projects, for just investigation or whatever, to make sure everything was okay. We did a lot of co-sampling, actually with DOE [Department of Energy], so when they would do their studies, we would accompany them and take part in them and stuff. We did fish stocking and stuff in East Fork Poplar Creek, and stuff like that, so. MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Exactly. MRS. CHARLES: Macro invertebrate studies, and things like that, to see about the health of the water and if it was improving, and all that. They used to do a goose roundup every year, and I guess, maybe, they still do it, but they catch the Canadian geese on the reservation when they're molting, so they're kind of flightless at that time. They grab them all and they do whole body scans on them. They don't kill them or anything, they put them in a box and do a whole body scan on them to see if they're picking up contaminates off of some of the waste ponds and stuff. Used to be open and they could get in them, so they would check to make sure that, because people would eat the geese, too. They would want to do a sample to see what the geese were getting into. I remember one year that one of their ponds, the flagging and stuff had gotten an old and it all gotten off the pond and stuff, and the geese were getting in there. It was a hot pond. Every goose was hot. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: Every goose. Usually everything was fine, but this year, this whole flock was just piping hot. Actually, the wildlife people came in and shot them, and killed them all, because they didn't want to let them loose. The geese are big, and they're hard to hold and they're heavy, and you take their heads and you tuck them under their wings so that they can't see anything and it calms them down. They scratch you, too. They bite you and scratch you, so you've got to hold their legs and you tuck their heads under their wings, and you've got to hold them. So I remember I was holding my hot goose and it got away. It left. It is like, "This isn't good." So, I don't know. Everybody was after the goose. MR. MCDANIEL: How funny. MRS. CHARLES: It was running away and it's like, "Don't let that goose get away." MR. MCDANIEL: That kind of reminds me of that story of all those frogs, those hot frogs, they used to have out there that get into those ponds. They'd hop all over the place and they were hot. MRS. CHARLES: I think they caught the goose later, but they never caught it that day. MR. MCDANIEL: It took off. MRS. CHARLES: He got a one day reprieve, or something, from death because I couldn't hold onto him. MR. MCDANIEL: All right, so after that job what did you do? We'll get finished here. MRS. CHARLES: I left there and went to Teledyne Brown Engineering, and that's where I'm at now. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: It was another radiochemistry lab. Their lab was in New Jersey and they were moving it down here. I think they were thinking that there would be opportunities for a radiochemistry lab here, and also because the cost of living is so much better down here than it is up there. It was a lot cheaper for them to operate a lab down here than it was in New Jersey. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, I understand. MRS. CHARLES: I used to have to fly into New Jersey and work up there, and come back down here and work. Eventually it moved down here and I've been there 16 years now, or something. We don't do any work for Oak Ridge. We do nothing. MR. MCDANIEL: Nothing for Oak Ridge. MRS. CHARLES: Nothing. It's not our clientele. We do most our work for nuclear power plants, so we do work for TVA but not for Oak Ridge. MR. MCDANIEL: Well, so what have I not asked you about that you want to talk about? You are a true Oak Ridger. True in the sense that everybody leaves for a little while, but they come back. You know? It seems like it. MRS. CHARLES: I remember so many things that it's funny, because people that live here now don’t know. I say, "Yeah, remember when the library was in Jackson Square?" That building is still there, but it's totally remodeled, but I remember going to the library in Jackson Square. I remember going to the movies, like next to Big Ed's there, that was a movie theater, and the drug store was Big Ed's. I remember all that. I remember a Valu-mart being in that same strip there, and we loved Valu-mart, that was like the best store ever. MR. MCDANIEL: Wasn't that the one you go in, and then there was these big old sets of steps that went into the basement? MRS. CHARLES: Yeah, I think there was a basement, too. MR. MCDANIEL: And that was the bargain basement. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Because I remember… MRS. CHARLES: The whole store was a bargain store, yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, but I mean it was really the bargain basement. I just remember as a small kid, it was like you're going into the pit of hell. It was this big opening downstairs. It was wide steps with a railing down the middle. I remember that, for some reason. MRS. CHARLES: Coke machines were six cents there. I remember the Knitting Nook and the Laughing Monkey. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: I'm Jewish and the synagogue was down the street there at Michigan. We would have to go to Sunday school and we also went on Tuesdays and Thursdays to Hebrew school, but we would get a little break and we would all walk down to the Jackson Square Pharmacy and get candy. I remember that. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly. MRS. CHARLES: That was like the best thing ever. Get those little wax Coke bottles. MR. MCDANIEL: The little wax Coke bottles. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. I remember doing that. Let's see what else I remember. There's just so many things. I went to Cotillion. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you? MRS. CHARLES: That was at Grove Center, there, was the Cotillion. I remember going there. That was in middle school. I guess my parents thought I should learn to dance. MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Be a young lady. MRS. CHARLES: Yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. MRS. CHARLES: When I was little, for one year I went to Roberta's School of Dance [Roberto’s], which I think it was on East Drive. There was a little shopping center on East Drive, which is a church or something now, and there was Roberta's School of Dance there. We did ballet. MR. MCDANIEL: Did you? MRS. CHARLES: Yes. MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. MRS. CHARLES: I remember, for a year, I did ballet at Roberta's School of Dance. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MRS. CHARLES: We had a recital with pink tutus and did Waltz of the Flowers, I remember that. MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. MRS. CHARLES: I remember in second grade, I was walking home and coming up, I guess, I'm not sure what the road is that goes up to Andover. We used to cut through, and there were people that had a rope swing in their back yard, and we would go swing on the rope swing. I fell off one time and broke my arm. We were coming up on Andover and I was really starting to feel sick and I laid down on the curb. They ran home and they were going to go get my mother, who I thought was going to come save me, but my mother still couldn't drive. She walked down there and told me to stand up and we would walk home, and I thought, "This isn't being saved. This is no good at all. I could've walked home on my own." MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. Without bothering your mother, and her being irritated by that. MRS. CHARLES: I don't know. I just played in the greenbelt a lot. That was fun. I remember it used to snow and we didn't have boots, and my mother put plastic bags over our shoes. MR. MCDANIEL: Really? MRS. CHARLES: Really. I don't know why we didn't have boots. I remember the house. I remember my dad, when he moved in that house on Euclid, all the rooms were painted really dark, like dark brown and dark red. I have no idea why, but they were painted that way. There was one closet room that was dark red and he never repainted it. We always called it the red room. MR. MCDANIEL: The red room. MRS. CHARLES: He said that the back yard was filled with liquor bottles, I remember that, too. I don't know who lived in the house before we did. MR. MCDANIEL: That would be interesting to find out. MRS. CHARLES: I remember the old coal furnace and that it would burp and we'd get soot in the house. The coal room, I remember where the coal chute was. They remodeled it and took all that out. MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. MRS. CHARLES: I think everybody did. MR. MCDANIEL: That was a D house. That was right on the front, the coal chute. MRS. CHARLES: It was on the front of the house, yeah. MR. MCDANIEL: Between the kitchen and the front door, that was the coal room right there. MRS. CHARLES: And the furnace was in there. MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah. Well, my goodness. Well, thank you so much for coming and sharing your memories of Oak Ridge and telling us a little bit about your life. MRS. CHARLES: Sure. MR. MCDANIEL: All right, very good. Thank you. MRS. CHARLES: You're welcome.
[End of Interview]